


we'll be okay (together)

by beforethecalm



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 20:18:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3868414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beforethecalm/pseuds/beforethecalm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first bomb hits and drags the floor from beneath them, with it, their parents.  Pietro is fast - not as fast as he will be in years to come, perhaps - but twelve minutes is still twelve minutes and he does what he always does; he protects her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we'll be okay (together)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: Up to and including the beginning of AoU. Nothing after that.

The first bomb hits and drags the floor from beneath them, with it, their parents.  Pietro is fast - not as fast as he will be in years to come, perhaps - but twelve minutes is still twelve minutes and he does what he always does; he protects her.

\-----

They spend two days in the rubble - alone, scared, waiting - a mere three feet from a shell that waits to burn adorned with one word.

STARK.

The smoke burns her eyes, her nose, her throat - she whimpers and she trembles and through it all, Pietro is with her, humming fragments of Sokovian lullabies into her hair.

A rescue effort is mounted and with every shift of a brick, she feels Pietro’s arms around her tense.   _This is it_ , she thinks (and she’s sure he does too) - too many times, too often, but the shell remains intact.

They’re pulled from the rubble to a different Sokovia - a Sokovia ravaged by bombs, their home and indeed their parents, dead and gone.

Their faces are tear-stained, dirty.  She refuses to let go of her brother’s hand long enough for their rescuers to even check them over and when she crawls into the small cot set up for them, his arm creeps around her shoulders once again, curves to hold her close.

Sleep is not forthcoming for either of them.  They’re a centimeter closer to safety, further from that bomb than they have been in two days and all they can feel is that fear, the weight of the rubble pressing down on them.

 _You’re all I have left,_ he whispers.

 _We’re all we have left,_ she returns.

\-----

The orphanage is large, gray, imposing.  The only real warmth is at her side, fingers entwined with hers.

She presses herself closer to Pietro, closer than is humanly possible, terrified at the thought they may ask her to let him go, even for just a moment.

They don't.

They're not the first orphans of a Stark bomb, they won't be the last, but the calming effect they have on each other is palpable.

\-----

It’s the first day of school after the bomb hit and Pietro is buttoning up the threadbare coat she’s been provided by the orphanage.

 _Stay close to me, I’ll look after you,_ he tells her.  The words are futile.  She looks at life in two ways now - _Before Stark_ and _After Stark_ \- and even Before Stark, Wanda stuck close.  

Perhaps it’s a twin thing, she thinks, because she’s never been far from his side - not longer than those first twelve minutes before she joined him in this world.

\-----

_She’s weird._

She supposes she should take more offence than she does at that.  She does not have super-hearing, no abilities to speak of other than a surprising aptitude for physics, but the words aren’t spoken quietly and they sting.

Before she can even glare at their speaker, Pietro is by her side.  And while Wanda may not forget, she does feel the blow lessen.

She can handle being weird as long as she’s with Pietro.

\-----

 _You know, I am 12 minutes older than you,_ he reminds her.  He does this just enough to be irksome - older brother annoying; which is to say, he does this _all the time_ \- and she lifts a hand, swats his shoulder, no real fire behind the blow.

Pietro grins, tugs her hand into his, interlinks their fingers.

 _We'll be okay,_ he tells her, even though he can't predict the future, can't possibly know.

Wanda believes him anyway - not because he’s older, not because those twelve minutes count - but because he’s never lied to her before.

\-----

The riots become a part of them.  Sovokia is still their home and they are both tenacious in it’s defense, even though it gets them nowhere, not really.

It feels like they’re doing _something_ and that’s enough.  But then HYDRA arrive in Sokovia and in them, Pietro sees a way out.  Not of their country - they’re as much part of it, as it is of them - but a way to help.

Wanda is wary.  She talks him down often when his plans get too crazy, but this... This is the very definition of madness.

They are taking children from the streets - volunteers, all - but shouldn’t it worry Pietro like it does Wanda that they do not seem to come back?

He tells her again, _we’ll be okay_ , strong fingers cup her jaw, and Wanda feels his determination curve around her, still her fears.

 _Okay,_ she whispers.

\-----

For the first time in years they are apart, separated by a brick wall.  She may have agreed to this but she feels the loss as keenly as if someone from HYDRA cut off a limb.

He’s a wall away and Wanda presses a hand to the cold, uncomforting brick. _It’s how it must be,_ she thinks, and _it won’t be forever_ and _we signed up for this_.

She has no abilities to speak of, nothing other than a connection to her older-than-her-by-twelve-minutes-twin and she whispers _we’ll be okay, Pietro_ because she believes it, because he made her believe it.

She thinks she can see him smiling on the other side of the wall.

\-----

The tests are invasive, awful and terrifying and weeks, months later, Wanda comes to the realization that there are reasons why those volunteers didn’t return.

She’s going to be one of them, she thinks, because she’s caught up in a haze of bright, ethereal  _blue_ and the last thought on her mind is not that she’s going to lose Pietro.  

It’s that he’ll have no one to look after him when she’s gone.

\-----

It is three days later when she wakes and Pietro is sitting by her bedside on a small plastic chair.  

His hair is longer, unkempt, and dirtier than she’s seen it in twelve years.  She reaches out a hand, startled when that first pulse of fear washes over her.

She can feel and see everything Pietro thinks - his worst fears, his nightmares - and it is so much worse than those two days they spent in the rubble.  He hides nothing from her - never has - but she sees her death in what he thinks he caused, in signing up to be Strucker's laboratory rats and she knows somehow that more than bombs falling on their home ** _this_** is his greatest fear.

She gasps and Pietro’s hand shoots out, curls around her own without her even seeing it move and all of a sudden that crippling fear is  ** _worse_**.

Her mouth moves, forms an anguished cry, and then she feels relief.  

It’s almost sweet, a direct contrast to the fear it beats back, and Wanda finds the immediate shift downright terrifying.  It’s more than a twin thing - so much more - and then she remembers that blue and it all makes sense somehow.

This is the great power Strucker spoke about?  The power that will help them win their war is for Wanda to _feel_?  She doesn’t think she likes that much but then Pietro’s face is close to hers, he breathes one word - _Wanda_ \- and she thinks that feeling may not be so bad after all.

\-----

Even as a child, Pietro was fast.  It seems fitting, then, that his power is speed.  He is so fast, he actually blurs and weeks later, once he has it under control, it seems he actively enjoys it.

Wanda cannot say the same.  Her hex blasts are affected directly by her emotions and, more than once, she’s blown something up in close proximity.  The only thing that calms her is Pietro.  She knows everything there is to know about her brother, even this faster, stronger, speedier version, and she doesn’t feel the need to switch herself off in his presence, lest he overwhelm her.

Being with Pietro is easy, being with others is not - but then hasn’t that always been the way? 

\-----

 _The twins are not ready,_ she hears Strucker say.  He would know, he’s spent the most time with them - building and cultivating and shaping.  He’s ready to surrender himself, not the mission, and the twins share a look.

S.H.I.E.L.D are infiltrating.  The Avengers.  Tony Stark.  The name alone makes something burn in her stomach.  Hatred, she thinks.   _More._  Her powers are still developing and Wanda feels she has a long way to go before she can control them entirely but for her chance at Tony Stark, she will take it.

She creeps behind him in Struckers lab.  He’s smaller than she imagined, slight, but she’s seen so much of him in that Iron suit that this does not really surprise her.

He approaches the sceptre and she lifts a hand, waiting that brief moment where his reality shifts around him and turns to the very thing he fears most.

His friends, his Avengers, lay broken and beaten and dead, torn apart because he did not stop this and it is strangely beautiful, she thinks, realizing his greatest fear is to see his friends die around him and be the only one left alive.

She feels Pietro’s presence as he blurs beside her, hears his _are you really just going to let him take it?_

Her answer is yes.  She sees Stark’s fear and just like Stark with that bomb, to destroy ** _his_** life, Wanda and Pietro don’t even have to lift a finger.

~ END


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